While Skinner had come up with the idea that we have a genetic predisposition towards learning behavior through operant conditioning, Lorenz went even further to suggest that at least some animal behavior may be genetically programmed. Other psychologists argued that all behavior is learned and even through conditioning anyone can be taught to do anything. Perhaps one of the most radical advocates of this behaviorist approach came from the Chinese psychologist Zing Yang Kuo who dismissed the notion of innate instincts as mere convenient ways to explain behavior that wasn’t really understood. He believed the aggression towards rats exhibited by cats was not instinctive but learned. In experiments, he reared kittens and rodents together and discovered that the cats didn’t attack the rats. They seemed to play with them instead. He concluded that all creatures go through an evolutionary learning process that molds their behavior, and there is no inherent trait of a single type of behavior.
Mind and brain
In many cultures around this world, there is the view that humans have a soul that exists independently of the physical body. For Greek philosophers, the soul was also viewed as the seat of our reasoning abilities - what we would call our minds today. While Aristotle...
